Word: titus
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...audience members leaving a typical screening of Titus, avant-garde stage director Julie Taymor's new film adaptation of Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus, silently stumbles through the door of the theater eyes closed or staring at their shoes and unable to discuss the film, or anything else, with their companions. What they have just witnessed has overloaded their brains, not just through its simultaneously breathtaking and shocking visuals, but by the sheer breadth of its historical focus and level of reference...
...fact, when friends asked me even days later whether I thought the new Titus was good, I could only offer that conventional adjectives like "good" and "bad" don't apply to this film-going experience, but that by all means they should see the movie. What Taymor has accomplished, against all odds, is a truly revolutionary form of expression. Both the uniquely visual quality of her imagination and the work at hand are traditionally presented on stage, but in this transfer she manages to take full advantage of the medium of film to show and to do more...
...liberties taken in this version, then, are not in language; they are visual. Titus is, regardless of how modern audiences react to it, surprisingly faithful to Shakespeare in that it does not contradict much of his original text, which lacked any stage direction. This is precisely why Taymor succeeds where other directors have failed: although she does feel free to invent on her own just as Shakespeare did, her invention is not in any way at odds with his. Her work does not second-guess Titus Andronicus or steal its fire; it expounds on it and creates...
...Titus himself, as portrayed by Sir Anthony Hopkins in one of his most brilliant performances to date, stands at the center of the web of wrongdoing, symbolically represented in one of the film's most stirring scenes by a country crossroads. Although his act of sacrificially murdering the oldest son of Tamora Queen of the Goths (the passionate and powerful Jessica Lange) sets the plot of the piece in motion, he spends most of the play contemplating and acting on his understanding of the human capacity for evil. Certainly, he is not above revenge, but as the protagonist, he allows...
...perhaps such resonance, the free-wheeling association of Taymor's images and the magic of the text itself, that make watching this adaptation of Titus a sort of dreamlike experience which continues well after the film itself ends. The images of the film have a way of growing in the imagination rather than fading away, leaving the audience curiously marked by the passing of this marvelous sensory experience...